men

conducted on philanthropic principles under a patriarchal government; and Swift's great work, after storming the outposts of human policy and human learning, breaks at last in a torrent of contempt and hatred on the last stronghold of humanity itself. The strength of Swift's work as a contribution to the art of fiction lies in the portentous gravity and absolute mathematical consistency wherewith he developes the consequences of his modest assumptions. In the quality of their realism the voyages to Lilliput and Brobdingnag are much superior to the two later and more violent satires: he was better fitted to ridicule the politics of his time than to attack the of Gresham," of whose true aims and methods he knew little or nothing; and the imagination stumbles at many of the details of the last book. But the wealth of illustration whereby he maintains the interest of his original conception of pigmies and giants is eternally surprising and delightful. Defoe could have made of Captain Lemuel Gulliver a living man; he, too, could have recorded with the minutest circumstance of date and place the misadventures and actions of his hero: it may well be doubted whether he could have carried into an unreal world that literalism, accuracy of proportion, and imaginative vividness of detail wherewith Swift endows it. The cat in Brobdingnag makes a noise in purring like "a dozen Stocking-weavers at work;" Gulliver is clad in clothes of the thinnest silk, "not much thicker than an English blanket, very cumbersome, till I was accustomed to them;" the sailing-boat wherein he shows his skill in navigation is taken, when he has done, and hung upon a nail to dry. These are the

sources of the pleasure that children take in the book; the astonishing strokes of savage satire that are its chief attraction for their elders derive most of their force from the imperturbable innocence and quietude of manner that disarms suspicion. Like Iago, Gulliver is a fellow "of exceeding honesty," and he goes about his deadly work the better for his bluntness and scrupulous pretence of veracity. But the design of the book forbids its classification among works of pure fiction; it is enough to remark that in Gulliver realism achieved. one of the greatest of its triumphs before its ultimate conquest of the novel.

The novels produced by lesser writers contemporary with Defoe and Swift are belated examples of Restoration literature, and have little infusion of the new spirit. Two women novelists, Mrs. Manley and Mrs. Haywood, may be classed as imitators of Mrs. Aphra Behn. Swift alludes to both, only to call Mrs. Haywood a "stupid, infamous, scribbling woman," and to record his impression that Mrs. Manley kept about two thousand epithets in a bag, and spilled them at random on her pages. The works by which chiefly they gained notoriety are petty chronicles of scandal, deriving their main interest from the thinly veiled identity of the characters introduced. The New Atalantis (1709) of Mrs. Manley, and the Memoirs of a certain Island adjacent to Utopia (1725) of Mrs. Haywood, can hardly claim to be considered as examples of the art of fiction, for the readers they attracted sought in them a record of fact. Interest in individuals, that interest so much lacking in the "Character" writings of the seventeenth century, is here, no

doubt, to be found in full measure, but unillumined by any semblance of eternity, the gift of art. Mrs. Manley wrote also The Power of Love, in seven Novels (1720), and Mrs. Haywood published a whole tribe of short stories, such as The British Recluse (1722), Idalia, or the Unfortunate Mistress (1723), Philidore and Placentia (1727). These short stories are akin to the comedies of the Restoration, but destitute of the glitter and life of the Restoration stage. Mrs. Haywood's best novels, The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751) and The History of Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy (1753), were written at a time when the art of the novelist had been new-created by Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett, so that they are separated by more than time from her earlier and briefer efforts. Some faint idea of the magnitude of the revolution that intervened might be gathered from a comparison of Miss Betsy with one of the heroines of the earlier tales, as, for instance, Placentia. Miss Betsy is all of the new world; she is own cousin to Roderick Random, and has been taken for an ancestor of Evelina ; Placentia, a quarter of a century older, is a kinswoman of Clelia and Parthenissa, whom she exactly resembles in life, in love, and in epistolary style,—only differing for the better in the brevity and dramatic symmetry of her history. Mrs. Haywood is a good specimen of that third-rate kind of author that multiplies the faint echoes of a literary success, and writes novels, as an oriental tailor makes garments, to a ready-made pattern, with dexterity and despatch. Her pre-Richardsonian work deserves mention, but it could teach nothing at all to the new novel that was so soon to supplant it.

CHAPTER VI.

RICHARDSON AND FIELDING.

In one or other of the various literary forms dealt with in the last chapter, almost all the characteristic features of the modern novel are to be found. Yet the novel was slow to arise. For many years after the appearance of the masterly sketches and tales of the Tatler and Spectator, writers were content to imitate these more or less exactly in the literary journals of the day, and to seek for no more ambitious development. It was not until years after Madame de la Fayette had created a new era in French fiction by her novel La Princesse de Cleves (1678), not until years after Marivaux by his Vie de Marianne (1731) had singularly anticipated Richardson in subject and treatment, although, so far as can be ascertained, without influencing him, that the English Pamela was born in 1740.

The reason of the delay is not hard to assign. New literary forms, although they are invented by the genius of authors, have a success strictly conditioned by the taste of the public. It is not likely that any professional writer will trouble himself to strike out a new path while the old paths lead to fame and fortune. And the fact

is that it was the decline of the theatre during the earlier part of the eighteenth century that made way for the novel. The drama no longer made any pretence of holding the mirror up to Nature, the audiences had no claim to be considered representative of the tastes of the wider literary public. The fashionable ladies of the time, as Fielding says in one of his farces, would "take a stage-box, where they let the footman sit the first two acts, to show his livery, then they come in to show themselves, spread their fans upon the spikes, make curtsies to their acquaintance, and then talk and laugh as loud as they are able." To the upper gallery the footmen and servants of the great had free access, and they imitated their masters in regarding a civil attention to the actors as the last resource of a jaded mind. the pit were assembled the only serious critics of the play, young templars and city merchants, but their tastes. were little likely to redeem the drama from the triviality to which it had sunk.

In

Nevertheless authors had learnt to regard theatrical success as the crown of literary ambition, and they were slow to unlearn the lesson. Steele and Addison, at the very time when by their literary criticisms they were educating the public to distaste the plays that held the stage, while by their prose sketches of life and manners they were showing themselves true followers of Shakespeare, though at a distance, could not rest content without trying their fortunes also on the stage. Addison's tragedy of Cato (1713) was for factitious reasons a success; Steele, who had an earlier play "damned for its piety," persevered in the drama until in the Conscious